After its premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival last October and a series of screenings both interstate and overseas this year, Bill Mousoulis’ latest feature My Darling in Stirling will have its Melbourne premiere on Sunday.
This musical marks Mousoulis’s 11th feature in a career spanning 40 years. A low-budget community-driven project, the film showcases the town of Stirling in the picturesque Adelaide Hills.
“I really wanted to make a musical as I’ve always loved music, and I have always really loved the 1964 French film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, where every line is sung, so I thought – I’ll do my little tribute to that film, a local Australian version of the same form, every line sung. And, having lived in Adelaide for just the last 7 years, I fell in love with the Adelaide Hills and the town of Stirling, so I thought – yes, that’s my location!” Mousoulis told Neos Kosmos ahead of the screening at ACMI in Melbourne .
The protagonist, a young woman, Emma (Amelie Dunda), studying at university and living at home with her mother and brother in the Adelaide suburbs, falls in love with a café waiter Nick (Henry Cooper), who lives and works in the town of Stirling in the Adelaide Hills (Peramangk country). Entranced by the man and the town, she begins to feel a sense of excitement and vitality in her life.
While My Darling in Stirling is Mousoulis’s first musical, he previously experimented with musical elements in his 2017 feature Songs of Revolution, shot in Greece. That film featured music video-style sequences with actors miming to pre-recorded songs by famous Greek bands.
“Musicals are like “magical” films”, he adds. “They make us go to another place, with different kinds of feelings. Most of my work is actually very realistic, ordinary stories of ordinary people, done in an “art cinema” form. With this one, I keep the realism by setting the film in the ordinary world, but I then subvert that by having everyone singing, creating a more “magical” feeling.”
Mousoulis wrote all the lyrics for the film’s 25 songs, set to pre-existing melodies. “I’m a huge music fan. I was in a band during my youth and wrote many of my own songs, so I found the process both easy and enjoyable, as did the singers and actors in the end.”
After 40 years in the industry and witnessing vast technological changes, Mousoulis remains driven by the beauty of art and the satisfaction it brings to both creators and audiences.
“I’ve enjoyed making films, I always have a desire to make films, to express a feeling or an idea. Superficially, it’s a form of play, of pleasure. At a deeper level, it gives great fulfilment to me.”
A recurring theme in his work is the human condition, where he explores “what life means in terms of our dreams, disappointments, sense of self, oppression, how we act, how we re-act, and especially how we rise again after tragedy.”
Born in Australia, Mousoulis didn’t delve into his Greek heritage until the past two decades. Between 2009 and 2017, he primarily lived in Greece, returning to Australia only for “holidays.”
“The two feature films I made in Greece (Wild and Precious in 2012 and Songs of Revolution in 2017) were informed by Greek politics and socio-cultural events-the Crisis in particular. They gave me a sense of resistance, a sense of fighting for the common man and his problems, if I didn’t already have that.
I believe my Greekness, in an overall sense, gives me passion and also a philosophical edge, to always question and explore things. So, in the “independent film” world that I inhabit, I always support the independent filmmakers around me, not the mainstream, commercial ones.”
Filming My Darling in Stirling, was a process everyone involved in loved, Mousoulis said. “Because it’s so unusual. It’s a low-budget film, so our attitude was to have some fun.”
He hopes the audience can take from his film a sense of joy at the highs and lows of life – innocence, joy, love, betrayal, sadness.
“The film goes through all these emotions and comes out the other end smiling, so I hope the audience do the same.”
The premiere in Melbourne, will take place on Sunday 22 September, 2.30pm, at the ACMI, Cinema 2.
There will be a filmmaker introduction prior to the screening and a Q&A after the film, moderated by film critic Philippa Hawker.
